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...There are no great deeds of this pontificate to recall," said England's George Basil Cardinal Hume sadly. Deeds, no. Impact, yes. Especially after the intellectual austerity of Paul VI, his successor's radiance, humility, directness and lack of pomp immediately endeared him to masses of people in a media age, as if they had befriended him by wire. "I felt that if I had a problem, I could go to this Pope and talk to him about it," said Father John T. Pagan of New York's Little Flower Children's Services. For many he seemed to rekindle singlehanded...
...John Paul style was etched on the memory most characteristically by his few papal audiences. He dropped the formal "we" and the intellectualized addresses of Paul VI, and inaugurated an era of laughter. In his last audience last week, John Paul interviewed young Daniele Bravo by microphone while 10,000 people listened in. John Paul: "Do you always want to be in the fifth grade?" Daniele: "Yes, so that I don't have to change teachers." Laughter. John Paul: "Well, you are different from the Pope. When I was in the fourth grade I was worried about making...
...audiences "attracted the immediate sympathy of the public but had disappointed and sometimes worried church officials. The Pope expressed a philosophy of existence that recalled on occasion the Reader's Digest: common sense, a little simple at that, which broke with the grand theological flights of oratory of Paul VI. Visibly, he did not have the culture and the intellectual training of his predecessor...
...even among Christian bishops. There has not been a Sicilian Pope in twelve centuries. But Salvatore Pappalardo could surmount that prejudice. A keen-minded Vatican diplomat who entered the Secretariat of State along with Giovanni Benelli, Pappalardo served early on as a secretary to Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI. Eventually he became Paul's pronuncio to Indonesia, where the tropical climate sapped his health. Forced to return to Italy, he headed the school that trains Vatican diplomats. (His health is now fine.) In 1970 Paul named him to the See of Palermo. There he swiftly quieted a city badly...
...Substitute Secretary of State under Jean Cardinal Villot, Benelli was for a decade a power to be reckoned with by churchmen who wanted to see the Pope. Though he has befriended and backed pastoral Cardinals like Luciani and Pappalardo, Benelli had never held a pastoral post until Paul VI named him to the See of Florence in 1977. A brusque Tuscan with a deceptively cherubic face, Benelli has earned good marks during his 16 months in Communist-governed Florence. Even during his years as Pope Paul's front-office strong arm, he served as an able conciliator in several sharp...